


The Queen of the Nile

by august_justice



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e08 Raving, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 02:29:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_justice/pseuds/august_justice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a little girl, Lydia wished her life had all the elegance and grace of Liz Taylor's Cleopatra. She just didn't understand quite what she was wishing for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen of the Nile

**Author's Note:**

> Lydia-centric fic based on the prompt Cleopatra from BetaZ. No Egyptian history or classic movies were harmed during the making of this fic.  
> Also, unbeta'ed, so if that sort of thing gives you hives, run for the hills. And, of course, that means any and all mistakes are my own.

When Lydia was young, she watched Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra curled under a blanket pressed against her father’s side. Before her parents got divorced, every Saturday used to be Classic Movie Night. Her father was a bit of an old movie buff, and her mother just seemed happy to be with the two of them, listening to Lydia explain to her father the inaccuracies whenever they watched a historical film before she got too caught up in the elegance and drama of what was taking place on screen to continue her running commentary.

The first sign of the trouble in her parents’ marriage was when Mom stopped piling on the couch with them on Saturday night, opting to go to a book club meeting with her friends or climbing up the stairs to lock herself in the bedroom before seven o’clock had barely rolled around.

Movie nights grew much more silent after that, and Lydia’s father always seemed distant or irritable, even snapping when Lydia would deconstruct the film they were watching. Pretty soon, she stopped talking during the films at all, instead watching in a glazed silence, still absorbing every facet on the screen as though she could escape into the world on screen. By the time she was ten, she told her father that she was too old for movie nights. She wanted to join the Junior Pep Squad, and they had meetings on Saturdays anyway.

The fighting had gotten worse, and there was a constant ring of red in her father’s eyes. He mostly looked relieved when she finally had the good grace to release him from his responsibilities to her.

She didn’t join the pep squad. The entire team was full of airheads, and she wouldn’t have been able to stay in the same room as them for more than five minutes without screaming. She did, however, learn quite a bit by mockingly imitating the girls' voices to the mirror in the girl's bathroom, mixing her voice to that pitch between high and whining that she had perfected by the time she hit high school. It was a nice cloak of armor to wrap around herself and shield her peers from the suspicion that she was smarter than the entire AP Chemistry class including Harris.

Her father still asked her how pep meetings went, promised to come see them cheer sometime. She never bothered to correct him.

Before that, though, when times were still good, she dreamed of being a part of the world onscreen. She was barely seven years old, and her father would tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight with a “Sleep well, my Queen of the Nile,” and Lydia would drift off into the dreamscape of ancient Egyptian deserts, covered from head to toe in elegant jewels and gowns atop her throne as decadence and luxury swirled around her. There, in her dreams, she was untouchable, above everyone, as pretty and perfect as a piece of delicate porcelain.

Sure, even at that age, she knew that in reality Cleopatra had often wore a beard as a symbol of her rule of the Egyptian throne and her status alongside any other world leaders of the time. But there was something so classy about the way Elizabeth did things that Lydia couldn’t help but imagine herself in that dark, shadowed eye makeup adorned in gold.

Not that the real Cleopatra was anything to snuff at. The woman had spoken basically every relevant language of the time, making sure that she was capable of communicating with other nationalities and respecting other cultural practices. She was fiercely intelligent, independent, graceful, beautiful. She was everything Lydia idolized at that age. Lydia wanted to be Cleopatra.

She hadn’t thought of Elizabeth Taylor or Cleopatra in a long time.

She’s standing outside the Hale house, the cool breeze chilling her from head to toe.

A dead man and Derek Hale are inside.

No, she hadn’t thought of Cleopatra in a long, long time. Not until she woke up with a ghost lying next to her in bed. That was when all the old myths started coming back to her, swirling inside her head. Cleopatra had faced the severed head of a sister, tumultuous affairs with two powerful Roman rulers, and a life ended in the suicide of herself and her lover. She had walked across the soil of a land where the dead were revered, where Isis calls Osiris back into the land of the living.

So Lydia was no queen of the Nile. But werewolves did trounce out of the night to maul her on lacrosse fields. And her (ex)boyfriend had totally gone AWOL, slowly pulling away and becoming a distant figure she no longer recognized, creating a turbulent, toxic passion between them that she could only foresee ending in mutual disaster. Friends lied straight to her face, and then the former Alpha werewolf slipped into the crevices of her mind and whispered for her to do his bidding in the tender tones of a lover.

And now dead men stepped out of her dreams and into the light.

A chill runs over her spine as she closes her eyes, trying to forget the look of Peter’s dirt covered face.

Lydia’s life was shaping up just as the naïve seven year old girl she once was had so recklessly hoped.


End file.
